14

Pedro Vituri

Did the number 14 mean something to you before this project?

You know, not really. I’ve always been very fond of 7, which is related to 14. That’s kind of where I started.

Where did you go from there?

Well it’s funny, responding to numbers as a musician is something that’s kind of easy and kind of endless at the same time. I think music has a lot of numbers and intervals and tempos and, you know, all these things that are described by numbers. The first thing that I did was think about all the tons of ways in which I could put 14 into there. Like, can I think of a tempo in 14? That may be a little too slow. But I could think of a measure in a 14, so that’s what I did. I made a beat which was kind of a 14.

Then I started thinking of intervals, you know, the distance between notes. Can I do 14 semi-tones or 14 whole tones or a 14th, which is like a 7th an octave up. That’s how I started my process, just to list all the sorts of ways in which 14 could appear. And there’s easier things, like for example, there’s 14 tracks altogether in the tune, which is another way of doing that.

There’s 14 tracks in it?

Yeah, there’s 14 tracks in it. I kinda stopped there. I was going a little meta. I wanted to put more stuff in because I like dense things and I’ve been on a dense kick. 14’s not a low number of tracks to have in a piece like this. I wanted to put more stuff in, but I was like no no, 14 is the number, let’s just do that.

I made the beat, which comes and goes throughout the tune. It’s kind of a low-fi, 80s sounding beat, which seems a little fun. And I was like okay let’s put some pads in and some harmonies and from that I used the intervals, like either 14 semi-tones or the 14 as an interval, which are two different things. I think if you’re a layman it’s probably hard to understand.

I did that, I made some pads, thinking of the number 14 as my harmonic content. That I did over the beat. And then I did a very dense pad which is the beginning of it. It’s that big buildup. Which I manipulated with a stutter edit tool, and it creates all sorts of distortions and stutterings. So there’s altogether 14 stutter edits in that buildup in the beginning as well, which is also kind of cool. What else? 

After that, I wanted to do another section. At some point I thought I was gonna do 14 different sections, but it turned out that it was gonna be too long. I was like, I don’t wanna write a 20-minute piece of music and I don’t think you’d wanna listen to a 20-minute piece of music. So I was like, okay let’s take it easy. Then I did another section which was the one with the distorted strings. It’s 14 notes as well, the intervals and harmonies are all in 14. 

I did some manipulations and then I started copying and pasting things, kind of building this collagey thing. It comes and goes from this lo-fi speed with these pads and this little melody on top with distorted strings and buildups and all the little different things that happen throughout the composition. I wanted to turn it into this collage thing that almost sounds as if I’m working with tape. As if I’m piecing together tape, Stockhausen style.

At the end of it, I had all these tracks and I could do different things with it. I had a limited number of tracks to work with, because I stopped at the number 14. I was like, I’m just gonna paste them in different ways, manipulate them in different ways, put them together in different ways. After I brought back the buildup that comes in the beginning, it comes back later, a lot of other things happening around it. 

I was like, you know what this needs? 14 beats. So there are 14 bass drums that happen every now and again and that second time that buildup comes along.

For me, that’s the point where it’s like, Oh man, that’s freakin’ dense. So the relief at the end, when the pad and the melody keep going but the drums are not there anymore, was pretty necessary for me to finish that. Giving everyone a heart attack here, so let’s just ease out.

That’s amazing. I love that you tried to pull in the number 14 into as many places as you could in this piece of music.

It was funny because sometimes, getting prompts like that, I try to be not as literal. But I think when someone gives me a prompt that’s a number to write a piece of music, there’s so many fun ways to be very literal about this! And there’s no reason for me not to, because I don’t get the chance to do this a whole lot. You know? So just let me go to town on the number 14!

No, that’s amazing! Especially since it didn’t specifically have any symbolic meaning to you. It makes sense to me that you go in this really literal direction and make something really cool out of that.

I’m actually really curious to see what other people in other mediums are doing. For me, it just seemed like music lends itself so well to this.

It’s really interesting. I think that people often think of numbers as sort of separate from art, and I don’t believe that. I think that they have their own language which is equally interesting sometimes. I just love that we have so many cool artists exploring that, you know?

It’s funny, though. That’s something I thought about that in the process. The number 14 is, I guess, a lopsided thing in music. Whereas if I had gotten the number 4, for example, I that piece of music would be a lot more, let’s call it a square. It would be a lot more traditional sounding. It would be a lot more “normal”. I think that’s a very interesting part about it. The randomness of the number really brought something to the piece. If the number was 3 or 4 or 12, it would be a very different, much more traditional sounding piece than this is.

I like that you called it a lopsided number. I think that’s interesting. I know in music there’s the 4-count, the 8-count. And then in Flamenco music there’s 12-count, right? And that’s weird, right??

Yeah! Exactly, that is already weird. So 14 is weirder! To be honest, I spend a lot of time in my musical/academic career trying to make times like 7 and 13 and 14 sound natural and not like this complicated thing. I wanna make it sound fluid if it is lopsided. I spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. I think this beat is actually pretty good at doing that. If you don’t think about it too much you don’t realize how lopsided it actually is. But at the same time, it’s definitely uneasy. 

I think what’s cool about it is there definitely seems to be some unease in the piece, but if you’re not a musician listening to it, then maybe you don’t know why. Is that time signature? Is that what that is?

Yeah, it’s the time signature, that beat. It’s 14 tempos for the cycle to come back. And that’s kind of weird. That’s not a very traditional thing. But I try to avoid the sensation of a hiccup, which is what happens. When you see first year music school students playing in 7, everybody’s banging their heads every time the one comes back, and it sounds like this big hiccup every time the measure comes back. I try to avoid that very intensely but it’s still very lopsided no matter what.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you want to talk about?

I don’t think so, actually. I talked about a lot of things that are about my process. At the end of the day, I tried to put 14 more things that I couldn’t fit in. For example, I tried to mix in 14, but the truth is that that just didn’t work. It hurt the clarity of the final product, and I was like, well maybe then no? I had to draw a line somewhere. And maybe that was a little flaw of mine in that process, but at some point, I had to make some choices. Which I did, and maybe now I’m finally regretting them.

Does the number 14 mean something different to you now than it did before?

Definitely. I was thinking about it because in the beginning, I said I was fond of the number 7, and I felt this relationship with 14 being 2 x 7. At the end of the process, I do have a very different relationship. I feel it more specifically and more on its own as its own thing rather than a function of some other number, like 2 x 7. I think that’s a cool, interesting thing.